Spyware Sucks
“There is no magic fairy dust protecting Macs" – Dai Zovi, author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook"

When is hacking not hacking?

August 29th 2013 in Uncategorized

An interesting article: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/08/29/reality-tv-mother-of-eight-kate-gosselin-sues-husband-for-hacking-email-phone-revealing-private-info/

It certainly is true that we allow words to be misused / watered down / become too “catch-all”.

But then we read this, where a person who broke into Sarah Palin’s email account by guessing the answer to her secret questions is described as a hacker: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/11/12/sarah-palins-email-hacker-sentenced-to-366-days-in-custody/.  The main difference between the two incidents is personal knowledge from a husband/wife relationship in the Gosselin case compared to no-relationship-gotta-search-Wikipedia in the Palin case.

So what do you think the definition of “hacking” should be?  I tend to agree with what Sophos’ seems to think (that using knowledge from a personal relationship isn’t hacking, but having to go searching for info you’re not otherwise privy to is).


Comments are closed.

This is sad:http://www.infosecblog.org/2013/08/closed/
I can understand how work policies and vendor sensitivities can make blogging awkward, if not impossible at times.  I’ve faced the same challenge often enough myself. We are always having to balance getting information out there that is useful with trying not to embarrass the victims or clue the bad guys in to […]

Previous Entry

Check out this article: http://www.bluecoat.com/security-blog/2013-09-04/untangling-major-malvertising-network Historically a sign of danger is a domain that is new (say a few months). It seems the bad guys have cottoned on to this and are registering domains and leaving them dormant for many months before using. So, it seems like we now should not […]

Next Entry

Archives